Pintle MG's
- Thread starter hithero
- Start date
DM said:
Yes, but the points are a finer tool. You could limit something to only one, or maybe three, or whatever number. But that would not reflect something that was hard to come by (or costly to manufacture) but was fielded in numbers when available. Only a five point increase compared to another country's list would seem like a small effect, but means that might you have to sacrifice something else. It's really an old trick in an armylist writer's toolkit.
In this case it reflects the fact that Germany had invented a machine gun that was not only realiable and versatile; being made mostly of machine-pressed steel plate it was cheap and easy to manufacture. Over 200.000 units were made in 1944. (And yes I know that the tank MG's were mostly MG34's, that's because the MG42's were issued to infantry units first, releasing lots of MG34's to mount on vehicles where they were less exposed to dirt and wear. It still means that there were lots of machine guns around...)
DM said:T-34s ought to be dirt cheap then
And get progressively cheaper as the war goes on, and as the tanks get better.
The question here is - are you balancing your points based solely on combat capability (stats), or based on some notion of real life cost/availability?
TBH you'd be better off doing the former, and leaving the latter to the gamers when they set up their play scenarios.
Foxmeister
Mongoose
Alexb83 said:
I concur. As far as I'm concerned, points values should always be representative of combat effectiveness within the game.
If you want to represent unit rarity, you should do so using appropriate minima/maxima (e.g. Max 1, or 1 per 5 units of infantry whatever).
After all, if you are going to play a historical game (BFE, FOW whatever) using a historical scenario, you should be throwing points values out of the window and looking at the actual forces involved.
Regards,
Dave
Rabidchild
Mongoose
I agree. Points should represent the ability on the board, with other restrictions to add flavor and differentiate the armies.
Graywinter
Mongoose
In my opinion, points should be strictly based upon the game value. I have to agree.
Laffe said:
That would be done by army lists, well it is in all other games anyway. And are you saying that Germany could produce more and cheaper MG's than the US to warrent the 35pt-25pt difference?
After reading the rules again its all pretty accademic and pointless anyway as half-tracks don't have multifire so can't fire more than 1 MG!! I guess they just have 1 guy running up and down the half-track firing one at a time.
If the aim of points (as it should be) is just to assign relative value to what you're paying for (how much 'better' is an 88mm long tank gun to a 17pdr? how much 'better' is a Tiger to a Firefly or a 76mm Sherman?) and hence allow people to select roughly 'equal' forces, then the real-life cost of the kit has no bearing.
So and MG42 will cost more than a .303 Vickers because it has better range etc.
Points-based gaming has no relevance to 'real life' situations - a T34 in 1940 actually cost more to make and they were more scarce than T34/85s made several years later - but the T34/85 is a far superior tank in every way. It should cost more.
What you need to do is consider that when you play a game in 1944, if you are playing a scenario, in that scenario the Soviets should have more tanks and more men.
If you're playing a 'competetive' points game, then fair enough - and in honesty if your points scaling is accurate, you should be able to play any force from any period against any force from any other period and you should have equal chances of winning.
Or think: here is a British infantry company - how numerous were Bren guns, 2 inch mortars and MMGs in the period I am playing? Here is the appropriate company breakdown... and so forth.
So and MG42 will cost more than a .303 Vickers because it has better range etc.
Points-based gaming has no relevance to 'real life' situations - a T34 in 1940 actually cost more to make and they were more scarce than T34/85s made several years later - but the T34/85 is a far superior tank in every way. It should cost more.
What you need to do is consider that when you play a game in 1944, if you are playing a scenario, in that scenario the Soviets should have more tanks and more men.
If you're playing a 'competetive' points game, then fair enough - and in honesty if your points scaling is accurate, you should be able to play any force from any period against any force from any other period and you should have equal chances of winning.
Or think: here is a British infantry company - how numerous were Bren guns, 2 inch mortars and MMGs in the period I am playing? Here is the appropriate company breakdown... and so forth.
Foxmeister
Mongoose
Laffe said:
In my opinion, at the scale of battle that WaA represents, economic/manufacturing considerations are well outside the scope of the game. Otherwise, for every King Tiger you see on the table you should see 20 Shermans and 100 T-34s.
Regards,
Dave
hithero said:
YES, I am. Read my previous post in this thread 8)
Um... yes. I was answering from an armylist-making perspective. That there are more ways than one to represent availability.
Anyway, I'm thinking of houseruling that if you have an inf. squad in the HT it can use the second MG. Otherwise you could point your more armoured nose at the more dangerous opponent and MG the one behind you.